The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  “No, sire, there was not, but when the cake was cut, there was confusion as the birds flew out,” I said sadly. “He took Thomas Bell’s slice from the cook then to poison it.”

  “Ah yes, the birds. A pretty conceit,” the King remarked absently. “And a dangerous one.”

  “Indeed it proved,” I agreed.

  “And yet,” he continued, “I believe, Parson Fish, the poison was not in that cake, but in the wine. When the birds flew out, advantage was taken of the confusion to add the poison not to the cake but to the glass that stood by Master Bell. The flagons were on the table. It would be an easy matter.”

  “Sire?” I could not tell where this was leading.

  “In my youth, when I translated the Bible, I realized that English is a most dexterous language. One word might have two or yet more meanings. Stay, for example. It means to succour, or it can mean to stop, to prevent. Poor Thomas Bell had a most irritating habit of demanding ‘Stay me with flagons’ – is that how Clarence interpreted the will of Satan? Prevent me with poison from bedding the countess? Speak, O my translator.”

  “Alas, I fear so,” I stammered, taken aback at his Majesty’s acumen.

  “You translate the Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s,” King James said reflectively. “I have no doubt that the Archdeacon is guilty. You spoke eloquently for him. He killed Sir John Hengest, he killed the Earl of Sully and he killed the Earl of Lillyfield that he alone might be my cousin’s companion. Cousin Lucy is a witch indeed, but one who is innocent at heart. Losing her must be punishment enough for him. Even so, the Archdeacon would surely face death – were it not for his good deed.”

  I was shaken. Good deed? “And that was, sire?”

  “He let it be thought he killed Thomas Bell. I believe him innocent of that. He stood by me while the doves played their tricks, and poisoned no cake.”

  My heart jumped. “Then who, sire?”

  “You, Septimus Fish. You who spoke so eloquently of Archdeacon’s Hall’s passion. Which was yours also. You who poisoned the wine doubtless with a preparation from your own garden. You whom I saw place it at Bell’s side when the birds flew out. Finish your translation, Fish, and then you and the Archdeacon shall answer to me.”

  I am sick of love. O witch of Carlross, thou hast ravished my heart.

  I am guilty. The Devil called me from Bell’s own mouth to take my place at my beloved’s side. But his words are now my penance, the hardest of all. The Song of Songs must read forever Stay me with flagons.

  ICE SAILOR

  LAIRD LONG

  The wave of exploration that had started in the sixteenth century with such notable sailors as Francis Drake, John Hawkins and Humphrey Gilbert, had far from abated by the seventeenth century. One noted, indeed notorious navigator was Henry Hudson (c. 1570-c. 1611), after whom Hudson Bay and the Hudson River are named. Hudson undertook four voyages seeking a passage across the waters of the North Pole to the East. Hudson was by all accounts a mean, even vindictive, man and on the fourth voyage in 1610/11 . . . well, rather than me tell you the outcome, let it unfold in the following story.

  Laird Long (b. 1964) is a prolific Canadian writer with stories having appeared in a wide range of print or on-line magazines, including Blue Murder, Handheldcrime, Futures Mysterious, Hardboiled, and Albedo One. His story “Sioux City Express” from Handheldcrime was included amongst the top 50 mystery stories of 2002 by Otto Penzler in the anthology The Best American Mystery Stories – 2003.

  When Henry Hudson was told that John Williams had been found in the bush, dead, he finally began to give some thought to just how bad things really were, and how bad they could yet get.

  His ship, the Discovery, was aground on the southeastern tip of a frozen bay at the mouth of a frozen river, his crew of twenty-two and he seven months out of London – the Strait of Anian, the Northwest Passage to the exotic spices, perfumes, silks, and precious gems of Cathay and Java, still somewhere beyond the horizon. Instead of sailing the warm, open waters of the Western Sea, they were locked in ice at fifty-one degrees north latitude in the New World, winter’s full fury fast-approaching. And now the ship’s gunner was dead.

  Hudson looked up from the map he was sketching of the Groneland coast. “You found him?”

  “I did, Master,” Henry Greene replied. “Just now. I’d set off early to kill beast or fowl, collect on that reward you’d promised, and not far ashore I found John Williams rigid as an icicle dangling from old man winter’s nose.”

  Hudson set down his quill and sighed. “Rouse my son and the surgeon. You will show us your . . . discovery.”

  “Yes, Master.”

  “And, Henry, perhaps you should have the surgeon look at those wounds of yours.” Hudson gestured at his friend’s dirtily bandaged fingers.

  Greene scoffed, tucked his left hand back behind his back. “’Tis nothing, Master. Merely nicked myself on one of those blasted frozen rocks out there, is all.” He exited the cabin.

  Hudson stood, bundled his fur cloak about his shoulders and stared out the frosted panes of the cabin windows, at the bay. Uneven, unending, ugly yellow-grey ice and the last flecks of what had seemed ceaselessly blowing snow met his cold gaze. This was surely not the land the ship’s backers, the Company of Gentlemen (including Henry, Prince of Wales himself), had paid Hudson to find. He turned away in disgust.

  The four men met on deck, Hudson, his son, John, the ship’s surgeon and barber, Edward Wilson, and Greene. Hudson didn’t bother telling the other men why they’d been awakened so early on such a bitter morn, only gestured with a blackened thumb at the gangplank. Greene led the way.

  They stumbled across the boulder-jagged beach, across the barren, snow-covered land and into the stunted forest of spindly pine and spruce that grew branches on only their leeward side. Here the snow lay deeper in spots and the going was tough, hard, coarse, half-buried juniper bushes rasping against their clothing as they advanced. The feeble dawn was doing little to relieve the minus thirty degree cold. And this was only the middle of November.

  “Here lies John Williams,” Greene said at last, stopping and pointing at a slight depression in the snow behind some low-lying brush.

  Williams lay on his face, arms at his side, his instantly recognizable bristly red hair encrusted with ice. His hardships, at least, were over.

  Hudson banged his arms together, breath steaming out of his bearded mouth in white clouds. “Examine him,” he ordered Wilson. Then passed judgment: “The man was a notorious drunk – obviously he became intoxicated and wandered away from the shelter of the ship and fainted, died of exposure to the elements. Who was on watch last night?” he asked John.

  Hudson had ensured that a crew member was assigned to one of six, four-hour watches each day. It was his duty to watch over the ship, sound the bell each time that he turned over the half-hour sand glass. It was part of John’s duties to make up the watch list. “Mid-watch: Robert Juet. Morning watch: Adrian –”

  “I took that watch, actually, Master,” Greene intervened. “As I was rising early for hunting anyway, I traded with Mr Motter. And I can say that I noticed nothing unusual during those eight bells – until I ventured out here at first bell of the forenoon watch, of course.”

  Hudson snorted, turned back towards his ship. He was thinking of his map again, of the course to chart to the northwest when the ice finally broke, of the glory that would surely come to him and England when he reached the Orient by a route shorter and safer from taxes and pirates than any yet known. He was a stubborn man, and steadfast in purpose.

  Wilson shuffled forward in the snow, into the depression. He stumbled and toppled over on top of Williams’ frozen body.

  “You’ve not been imbibing yourself, have you, surgeon?” Greene jeered.

  Wilson glared at Greene. A long, thin teardrop of a man with a wandering left eye, he was as unskilled a surgeon as he was a barber, generally disliked by the men as a result. And the feelings of animosity were mutual,
especially where it concerned Greene; the two had exchanged blows over a goose on the western shore of Iceland, each claiming to have shot the fowl.

  Wilson rose unsteadily to his feet and brushed himself off. He touched Williams’ neck, clasped Williams’ wrist and then dropped it. “He’s dead,” he stated.

  Hudson whirled around. “You bloody sot! We can see he’s dead. What of?”

  Wilson eyed the corpse and coughed, spat out a sizable chunk of phlegm that froze almost instantly. Like most of the crew, he was sick with cold. “I’d say he froze to death, Master.”

  Hudson gritted his few remaining teeth. “You and John pick him up and haul him back to the ship. We’ll have a service onboard and then bury him in the ground. His belongings will be set before the mast and then auctioned.”

  John Hudson groaned. He was a slight boy of seventeen, given no special treatment by his father, the Master, whereas Greene possessed the broad shoulders of a river bargeman, and even greater strength, and was given all kinds of special dispensation by his friend and sponsor, the Master. John carefully made his way into the hollow with Wilson and Williams, lifted the frozen man’s shoulders while Wilson lifted his legs.

  “Oh-oh,” John said.

  There was a bloody patch of snow where Williams’ face had been.

  “No use stirring up the men until we have some answers,” Hudson intoned, glancing uncertainly at Wilson, Greene, and his son.

  They were back in his cabin onboard the ship, the body of John Williams stored in the hold. The gunner’s face had been battered to a pulp. Wilson had bandaged the man’s head, covering up the wounds before they’d brought him back to the ship. The crew was already nervous about the prospect of wintering further north than any white man had ever wintered in the New World before, and the gunner’s bloodied appearance would have only added to that general feeling of unease.

  “But obviously someone beat Mr Williams to death,” John protested, his ferret-like face twitching with excitement. “Or beat him and left him to die in the cold. You’ll have to conduct a full inquiry, father – to catch the culprit.”

  “I’d know where to look first, if I were Master,” Greene commented harshly.

  “And where would that be?” Hudson shot back.

  Greene’s full, red lips blossomed into a cold smile. He used his heavily ringed fingers to wipe that smile away when he met Hudson’s angry eyes. “Why, Robert Juet, Master, your former first mate,” he said. “We all saw those tiny footprints around Williams’ body – the ones left visible after our good surgeon had finished blundering about. No man has smaller feet than that evil dwarf Juet. He said there would be manslaughter, someone’s blood would be shed before this voyage was over – back in July, you’ll recall, when we were temporarily trapped by the ice. You saw fit to demote him for his treacherous mutterings, Master. Then pardon him,” Greene added. “Master Drake would have hung the man from the yardarm for saying such slanderous things, and been done with him.”

  “You and Mr Juet have been at one another’s throats for quite some time,” Hudson observed.

  Greene shrugged. “He accused me of cracking his credit, spying on him and the rest of the crew – for you, Master.”

  Hudson waved his hand impatiently. “Enough of that. Could those footprints not have been made by savages, perhaps?”

  “No, Father,” John quickly answered. “They had a definite heel and toe, like one of our boots. The savages we encountered on our previous voyage to America wore smooth-soled coverings on their feet – moccasins, they called them.”

  Hudson stroked his beard, his face grim as the outdoors. Gusts of arctic wind buffeted the stout-hulled barke, leeched through the planking and into the men aboard.

  At last, Hudson pointed at Greene. “I want you to find out what you can from the crew. You live amongst them and they trust you – but be tactful.” He pointed at Wilson. “And I want you to find out anything more you can from an examination of Williams’ body.”

  The two men nodded and departed, leaving Hudson and his son alone in the cold, cramped compartment.

  John spoke. “We know Robert Juet is guilty of preaching blood and thunder to the men, father, putting many of them in their sick bed with fear of being trapped in the ice forever. But I trust Henry Greene no more than I trust Juet. They’re both villainous men capable of murder.”

  Hudson looked at his son. “You’ve sailed on all my voyages in search of a northern passage to the Orient, John. But that does not qualify you to judge men, or handle a ship’s crew. Robert Juet has proved himself a first-class navigator over two of those same voyages. And Henry Greene, well . . . his singing and flute and fiddle playing are a tonic to the men’s morale – and mine. And both men are needed if we are to survive this winter and sail out of this godforsaken place in the spring.”

  “Juet is an old man filled with mean tempers,” John argued, “while Greene is a roustabout and a gambler, the companion of pimps and trollops in London.”

  “Hold your tongue, boy!” Hudson thundered. “Mr Greene was a guest in our home not so very long ago. I will hear nothing bad about the man.”

  “How true,” John clucked, before slinking out of the cabin under a withering glare.

  Hudson sat down at his desk, ran a gnarled hand over his grey, weather-lined face. What an ill-fated voyage this had been, so far. First, the ship’s cat had gone mad when they’d rounded the Orkneys, racing from side to side and staring overboard and yowling like the devil – a sure sign of bad tidings. And then Mount Hekla had erupted as they’d passed it by on the coast of Iceland – a sure sign of foul weather in short time. And the bad weather and bad tidings had indeed come, fog setting in and gale-force east winds driving the icebergs together into a hard pack that could not be penetrated, forcing the ship to anchor for two weeks in Lousy Bay. And only a short time after finally setting sail again, they’d become caught up in ice far from the sight of land, and a mutiny had almost broken out.

  Order had just barely been restored by reasoning with the men, congratulating them on journeying farther into the Northwest seas than any Englishmen had before, convincing them to continue the search for the passage that would make them all a part of history. But after successfully navigating the conflicting currents of the Furious Overfall, dodging treacherous ice every league of the way, and finally sailing into a large body of water that promised to be the Western Sea, months of fruitless sailing had proved it to be nothing more than a bay, not an ocean passage at all.

  Hudson slammed his fist down on his desk and uttered an oath. He was fast becoming an old man, and still the riches of the East lay well beyond his bowsprit.

  Greene reported back later that afternoon, as the weak sun was being swallowed by the blustery horizon. Hudson was on the quarterdeck, watching his men carry tools and timber from the ship’s hold to the leveled clearing in the bush where their winter house would be built. The sailors were stumbling all over each other, hearty seamen used to dancing across rolling decks and scampering up and down singing rigging, not trudging about on frozen, snow-heavy ground with house-building equipment on their shoulders. Hudson shared their discomfort, for on land, a ship’s Master was not such a sure and big man, either.

  “What have you learned, Henry?” he asked Greene.

  “Quite a lot, Master,” the man replied, his handsome face alive. “John Williams is remembered as being on-deck and working almost to midnight last night, before retiring below decks.” Greene glanced around. “And there he was heard in rather heated conversation with one Mr Juet, in the gunroom.”

  “What was the nature of their conversation?”

  “Well, Master,” Greene leaned closer to Hudson in the gathering gloom, “they were discussing . . . mutiny – a topic not unfamiliar to Mr Juet. He was putting forth the proposition that you, Master, had wasted precious summer sailing weather by meandering about in this bay, that you’d lost your bearings, as it were, that we’d never escape this frozen Hell and
return to England with you at the helm.”

  Hudson grunted, wiped his red, running nose. “What was Mr Williams’ reply?”

  “Aye, Master, that’s just it. Williams was having none of it. Juet was trying to get the man onside, no doubt, so he would have ready access to the shot and powder, the muskets and cutlasses in the gunroom – the weapons he and his gang would need to seize control of the ship. But Williams was most adamantly opposed, and threatened to report Juet to the mate. They left it there, so far as my witness tells me. But Juet stood watch the first part of last night, as you know, and he could have easily roused Mr Williams, cooled the man off but permanent so he wouldn’t upset his traitorous plans.”

  “Robert Bylot!” Hudson barked.

  The recently-appointed mate came scrambling up onto the quarterdeck. “Yes, Master?”

  “You and the bos’n seize Robert Juet and place him in irons.”

  Bylot looked uncertain, but Hudson’s uncompromising face soon sent him scurrying off to fulfill the order.

  Greene leaned closer still, whispering familiarly in Hudson’s frostbitten ear, “I should like to have Williams’ wool coat, Master, if it’s at all possible, as I am so very cold in this weather with no proper garment to clothe me. I know it be tradition to auction –”

  “It’s yours,” Hudson gritted.

  The surgeon reported back later that evening. Hudson was in his cabin with Greene, helping the man practise writing by having him recopy log entries. Wilson observed the chummy pair, a frown creasing his ragged lips; the passenger’s familiarity with the Master, which oftentimes included dining with Hudson to the exclusion of the other ship’s officers, had long been a source of bitterment with Wilson.

  “Begging your pardon, Master,” he said, stifling a burp in Greene’s general direction.

  “Yes, what is it?”